nd shorter than her sister. She had
a rosy complexion, and eyes as bright as a bird's. She had, too, the
merriest laugh in the world till Jenny grew older and made it sound
almost mirthless beside her own. It was this capacity for laughter which
made her resent the aunts' attempt to capture Jenny for melancholy.

Although, before the child's birth, she had not been particularly
enthusiastic about its arrival, the baby already possessed a personality
so compelling that the mother esteemed her above both the elder
children, not because she was the last born, but because she genuinely
felt the world was the richer by her baby. If she had been asked to
express this conviction in words, she would have been at a loss. She
would have been embarrassed and self-conscious, sure that you were
laughing at her. She did venture once to ask Mabel if she thought Jenny
prettier than the other two; but Mabel laughed indulgently, and Mrs.
Raeburn could not bring herself to enlarge upon the point.

She wished somehow that her mother could have lived to see Jenny, and
her father, too. Of this desire she was not aware when Alfie and Edie
arrived. She felt positive her father would have considered Jenny full
of life. Paradoxically enough for a butcher, Mr. Unwin had admired life
more than anything else. Perhaps Mrs. Raeburn experienced an elation
akin to that felt of old by wayside nymphs who bore children to Apollo
and other divine philanderers. She knew that, however uneventful the
rest of her life might be, in achieving Jenny she had done something
comparable to her dreams as a girl in the sunny Islington window that
looked away down to the Angel. She could not help feeling a subtle pity
for her elder sister, whose first-born was due in May. Boy or girl, it
would be a putty statuette beside her Jenny. The latter was alive. How
amazingly she was conscious of that vitality in the darkness, when she
felt the baby against her breast.

Her own eyes were bright, but Jenny's eyes were stars that made her own
look like pennies beside them. Such fancies she found herself weaving,
lying awake in the night-time.

Chapter III: _Dawn Shadows_

Jenny reached the age of two years and a few months without surprising
her relatives by any prodigious feats of intelligence or wickedness. But
in Hagworth Street there was not much leisure to regard the progress of
babyhood. There was no time for more than physical comparisons with
other children. I